Lab Members

Primary Investigator

Ursula Jakob

Primary Investigator

Dr. Jakob's research is on the biochemical aspects of the bacterial response to heat shock.

Dr. Jakob received her B.S. degree in 1991 from Regensburg University in Germany, and her Ph.D. in 1995 also from Regensburg University. From 1996 until 1998 she was a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan with a fellowship from the German government, and from 1998 until 2001 she was an Assistant Research scientist at UM.

Dr. Jakob has been chosen as a "Biological Scholar" at the University of Michigan, a prestigious designation awarded by a University-wide committee. She is also a recipient of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences 2000. In addition, she won a Sokol Postdoctoral Award in 1998.

Post-Doctoral Fellows

Daphne Bazopoulou

Research Fellow

Daphne Bazopoulou joined the Jakob Lab in 2014 as a postdoctoral fellow. She is utilizing sorting techniques, oxidative stress assays and gene expression profiling methods to investigate how developmental ROS contributes to aging and lifespan determination in C. elegans.

Daniela Knoefler

Research Fellow

Office | 4041 Nat. Sci.

Daniela joined the Jakob lab in 2007 to work on her PhD thesis investigating the role of oxidative stress in aging in Caenorhabditis elegans. After obtaining her PhD in 2012, she stayed on as a Postdoc in the Jakob lab. Daniela's research interests are in identifying why certain cancer cells become resistant to chemotherapy and how to restore drug sensitivity. She primarily uses cell-based assays, fluorescence microscopy and flow cytometry assays to study cisplatin resistance in mammalian cancer cell lines.

Francois Beaufay

Research Fellow

Ellen Quarles

Research Fellow

Ellen received her PhD in 2017 at the University of Washington where she worked on interventions for cardiac dysfunction in aging. Her work in the Jakob lab will build on that aging background, looking at polyphosphate abundance and localization in the aging brain and how this may correlate with histological signatures of Alzheimer’s disease in both mouse and human tissue.

Kathrin Ulrich

Research Fellow

Kathrin received her PhD in 2017 at Heidelberg University where she worked on stress-induced protein S-thiolation in African trypanosomes. She joined the Jakob lab in October 2017 to follow up on the functional characterization of the redox-regulated Get3 chaperone activity and study this thiol-based switching mechanism also in the highly conserved mammalian homolog TRC40.

Bryndon Oleson

Research Fellow

Wei-Yun Wholey

Postdoctoral Researcher

Graduate Students

Justine Lempart

Graduate Student

Justine has started her PhD in the Jakob lab in April 2016. Her research focuses on the role of polyphosphate in amyloidogenic diseases including Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's diseases. In vitro she is characterizing the underlying mechanisms of the interaction between polyphosphate and its amyloidogenic client proteins. Within a neuronal cell line she is investigating these findings in the context of a cellular system and tries to further unravel the protective role that polyphosphate has against amyloid toxicity.

Lihan Xie

Graduate Student

Research Assistants

Jake Erba

Research Technician

Lab Staff

Chris Sinkler

Lab Manager

Chris joined the laboratory in December 2016, acting as both lab manager and part-time researcher; his current projects revolve around adapting the tripartite fusion system into mammalian lines, to investigate protein folding in higher order species. He obtained his B.S. in Biochemistry from Michigan State University, and M.S. in Genetics from Wayne State University. This position allows him to combine his interests in management and student support with his background in molecular biology.

Ke Wan

Research Laboratory Technician Senior

Office | 4007 Nat. Sci.

Ken has worked as a lab technician at U of M for nearly ten years. He joined the Bardwell lab from an HHMI lab in June 2013. Ken’s work is mainly on protein expression and purification. His work consists of making all kinds of constructs for E. coli, Baculovirus insect cell and yeast systems as well as purifying proteins with or without tags using the AKTA system. He enjoys screening and optimizing the protein crystals as well. Ken likes traveling, swimming and fishing.

Undergraduates

Olivia Katamanin

Undergraduate

Philipp Hüttemann

Undergraduate

Philipp is a 2nd year undergraduate at the University of Michigan, double majoring in Biochemistry and German. Besides doing research, Philipp enjoys playing soccer and volleyball and loves traveling the world.

Olivia Chan

Undergraduate

Phuong Thai

Undergraduate

Madison Nightingale

Undergraduate

Jeremy Tervo

Undergraduate

I am a sophomore at the University of Michigan pursuing a double major in Biochemistry and German. I grew up in Hartland, MI, and throughout my education I have been drawn to the intricacies of the Life Sciences. My time outside of academics at the University is spent playing Alto Saxophone in the Michigan Marching Band and Campus Jazz Ensemble, teaching introductory Organic Chemistry Laboratories, and providing music lessons with Seven Mile Music to students in Detroit. After completing my undergraduate degree, I hope to pursue a career in academic medicine in a specialty that will allow me to apply much that I have learned in Biochemistry.

Asavari Rajpurkar

Undergraduate

Benjamin Sliwinski

Undergraduate

Ben is an undergraduate student here at the University of Michigan, from Grosse Pointe, Michigan who loves music and plays a lot of piano in his free time. He is also interested in all things medicine and is excited to work with Dani on her project on cisplatin resistance in cancer cells.